[Foundation-l] Letter to the community on Controversial Content

[Andreas K.]

On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 7:00 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro at gmail.com
> wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 2:44 AM, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> >
> > The English Wikipedia community, like any other, has always contained a
> wide spectrum of opinion on such matters. We have seen this in the past,
> with long discussions about contentious cases like the goatse image, or the
> Katzouras photos. That is unlikely to ever change.
> >
> > But we do also subscribe to the principle of least astonishment. If the
> average reader finds our image choices odd, or unexpectedly and needlessly
> offensive, then we alienate a large part of our target audience, and may
> indeed only attract an unnecessarily limited demographic as contributors.
> >
>
> You completely and utterly misrepresent what the principle of least
> astonishment is supposed to address. It is a matter of where people
> should be directed, when there are confliting disambiguation issues.
> It doesn't refer to content issues in the slightest. Period. We don't
> say you can read an article about X and not see pictures of X. That is
> ridiculous.
>


The principle of least astonishment is mentioned thrice in the board
resolution on controversial content:

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Controversial_content

"We support the principle of least astonishment: content on Wikimedia
projects should be presented to readers in such a way as to respect their
expectations of what any page or feature might contain"

Signpost coverage:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-06-06/News_and_notes#Board_resolutions_on_controversial_content_and_images_of_identifiable_people

Andreas